Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/480

 404 BOHEMIA. Sigismund at first fully justified the confidence reposed in him by Huss and John of Chlum. He made no attempt to say that his letters were not intended to protect Huss from prosecution, but treated them as having been wrongfully violated. As soon as he had heard of the arrest he had ordered Huss's release with a threat to break open the prisons in case of refusal. On his arrival at Constance, on Christmas Day, his indignation was boundless, and there was consequently great excitement. He protested that he would leave Constance, and, in fact, made a show of doing so ; he even threatened to withdraw the imperial protection from the council, but was plainly told by the cardinals that they would themselves break it up unless he yielded. The hopes of Christen- dom had been raised to too high a pitch as to the results expected from the assemblage for him to venture on such a risk. ]^>"aturally faithless, his insistence Was a matter of pride, and self-interest easily won the day. We have better materials for estimating his character than that of any other prince of the century, and from first to last we find fully justified the opinion of his contemporaries gagements which he knew he could not fulfil. From his indignation it is evi- dent that he was unacquainted with the niceties of the canon law ; but even if he were, his giving the letters is easily explicable by the fact, which Berger has well pointed out (pp. 100-1), that Huss's certificates of orthodoxy, obtained in August, were laid before him (Palacky Document, p. 70). He could thus easily persuade himself that there was no risk of his pledge causing him trouble. It was of the greatest moment to him that Huss should be reconciled to the Church, and to a man of his temperament it was inconceivable that Huss's delicate conscientious- ness would in the end render martyrdom inevitable. Hefele (Conciliengeschichte VII. 224), following Palacky, calls attention to the absence, in the letter of the Bohemian magnates to the council, September 2, 1415, of any reproach for violating the safe - conduct, and he argues thence that they'admitted that it could not protect Huss^from judgment as a heretic. So little is this the case that they emphatically declare that Huss was not a heretic, and if there is no allusion to the safe-conduct this is evidently attributable to their referring to certain previous letters to Sigismund which the council had ordered burned, and which they defiantly desired to be considered as embodied and repeated in the present one (Monument I. 78). Anything they might have to say on the subject must have been said in those letters, which presumably were the occasion of the projected decree of September 23, 1415, punishing as fautors of heresy all who vilified Sigismund for permitting the violation of his- safe-conduct.